


Monsters

by AgataVarano



Series: Scar [12]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Abusive Parents, Canon-Typical Violence, Coma, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Lara has finally woken up, Major Character Dumbassery, Minor Character Death, Protective Siblings, Stephen Strange is bad at feelings, everyone has the emotional intelligence of a piece of furniture, my babies are really bad with emotions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:14:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27333988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AgataVarano/pseuds/AgataVarano
Summary: In today's episode of "emotional intelligence isn't a requirement for neither Chemistry nor Med school": parents are the absolute worst and undergrounds are the best place to realize you've been living a lie for years.
Relationships: Original Female Character & Original Female Character, Original Female Character & Original Male Character, Stephen Strange & Original Female Character(s)
Series: Scar [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1826437





	Monsters

**Author's Note:**

> • English is not my first language so I'm sorry if there are any mistakes.  
> • You can find this and more fics on my Tumblr @/let-me-write-my-life and my Instagram @/agata_varano.

_ I'm sorry about your parents, they sound like bad people. - Icon For Hire (Sorry About Your Parents) _

Lara rushes out of the library, Elize trailing after her. The witch walks around the Sanctum, extricating herself in the labyrinth of corridors and rooms just enough to find Stephen in the kitchen. "Stephen," she exclaims, panic written all over her face. The sorcerer stops by the counter, a box of tea still in his hand. "Stephen, please, I need you to teleport me to New Orleans  _ now _ ."

The man blinks his eyes in confusion. "I'm sorry, haven't you just-"

"Please, it's about Jonathan," she pleas, her voice cracking. She doesn't even have the time to breathe that she is already in New Orleans, standing in the hallway of a base with Elize and Stephen.

She immediately starts running around, desperate to find someone. She's panicking, but somehow knowing Stephen and Elize are right by her side is keeping her from curling up on the floor and having a breakdown. She opens a door and finds the barrel of a gun pointed to her head. Before she can even say or do anything, the agent holding the gun has been thrown on the ground, the weapon far from his reach, by a golden spell.

"Where's Houghton?" Stephen asks as the redhead man sits up on the floor.

He crawls backwards. "Houghton… his mother… she told him she'd surrender to S.H.I.E.L.D…" Upon Lara turning as white as a sheet, he murmurs an apology.

She throws her hands in her hair and storms out of the room, scanning the building with her magic while running down whichever path is the clearest. Finally, her powers find something, two people alone on the underground floor, and she runs faster than she has ever done, her heart exploding in her chest.  _ "Please no…" _

The room is brightly lit and the walls are pure white, yet what she sees inside is the transposition of her darkest nightmares. "No!" A pained scream escapes her throat at the sight, her voice perfectly synchronized with her brother's body falling on the floor, a long shard of metal piercing through his stomach. Thin trails of blood come out of his mouth and nose, but his eyes still manage to find Lara, who looks up from the floor, tears in her eyes, and meets Sandra's gaze, her arm still stretched forward and a big grin painted on her brown tinted lips.

Lara doesn't even think about it. She storms into the room and immediately attacks her mother, throwing a sphere of fire at her. Sandra parries the attack, outstretching her new prosthetic arm to shield herself and promptly send Lara with her back against the wall.

The hit takes breath out of the woman's lungs and she rolls on the ground. Her eyes set on the other woman walking towards her and she jumps up, just preventing a shard of ice from impaling her. Sandra gets close enough for Lara to kick her in the stomach. The woman bends down, but straightens up a moment later, screaming in pain and stepping backwards, Lara's magic tightening around her body and burning her skin. A devilish smirk appears on her face, her blue eyes lit up with rage. Something moves, she can see it with the corner of her eye, Jonathan is moving slightly. Lara just needs to turn around for a second and Sandra has already pushed her away. She stumbles, trying to regain focus, but her mother has already punched her on the face. The woman's only flesh hand locks under Lara's jaw and, as her nails dig deeper into her skin, she can feel blades piercing through her cheeks. Lara screams in pain and attempts to free herself, but Sandra just holds her more tightly as her daughter's blood stains her long fingers.

"You should have not left your brother alone," Sandra mutters between gritted teeth and raises her other hand. Suddenly Lara's spell protecting her face fades away and all of her scars open again, hurting more than ever. She isn't entirely sure what her mother is inserting under her skin, she just knows it burns.

Lara wouldn't want to do it, but now her instincts have taken over. She outstretches her arm and a splinter of iron pierces through Sandra. The woman loosens her grip, her eyes wide open and her mouth agape in a silent gasp. She only has the time to swallow before her daughter retracts her arm and her lifeless body falls on the floor.

Now the air smells of blood and the floor is red, her face is sore and covered in bruises, but Lara couldn't care less. She turns around and rushes by Jonathan's side. The man's face is pale white, a hand abandoned on his abdomen. With an inhuman effort he tilts to face her, or maybe his head just loses its fight with gravity, Lara doesn't really know it. He turns a corner of his lips upward, but despite his useless attempts to reassure his sister he knows he's in terrible conditions.

Lara instantly tends to his main wound, deep and wide on his abdomen. She knows what she has to do, she has done it before. It has never been a question of life and death, but she has already nursed wounds with her powers before. Okay, it has only been scratches and light bruises, but the process is more or less the same, right?

She moves his hand to the side and presses her palm to his stomach, eyes set on his face. When she starts rebuilding his tissues, he almost screams. Almost, because his voice has long left his throat and he only manages to open his mouth and widen his eyes. She mouths an apology and focuses back on his flesh.

She's almost done, one step away from suturing completely his wound, when the corner of her eyes capture the sight of Jonathan closing his eyes. She stops, her magic dissipating in the air, and starts shaking his shoulder. "Jon? Jon!" No answer. "Jonathan!" The only sound she hears is that of footsteps coming downstairs. Fear invades her.  _ "No, no, no!" _ She stops, breathing heavily as her eyes water.  _ "No, please, don't." _ Someone steps into the room. Lara leans down her head, fisting Jonathan's shirt. A hand brushes her shoulder.  _ "Don't leave me." _ Her muscles tense under Stephen's touch.  _ "I shouldn't have left you alone." _

The slow beeping of the monitor fills the room. Bip. Bip. Bip. Bip. Bip. She takes a deep breath and crosses her arms on the white sheets. Two weeks have passed, marked by that constant heartbeat. Two weeks in which Lara has spent as much time as possible in that white room, curled up on an uncomfortable chair until her back was completely destroyed. Or until a nurse kicked her out of the hospital.

Rain is pouring down, drops trailing down the window glass fast. Doctor Seward looks down desolated as she buries her hands in her hair and pins her elbows on the bed. "I'm sorry, miss." 

Lara is calm. Perfectly calm. She has never been calmer. If it weren't for her heart shattering to pieces and her growing desire to scream, of course. Jonathan may never wake up. His heartbeat is so slow he shouldn't even be alive. The Substance Y running in his veins is too little for him to be conscient, but too much for him to die, so he is stuck in a limbo. The only thing doctors can now do is wait until he either wakes up or dies, the latter being much more likely than the former.

Doctor Seward leaves the room, the sound of his footsteps being completely covered by that of the pouring rain outside. Now in the room there's only silence, but it's not relaxing nor anxious. It's different from every kind of silence Lara has ever heard. Because, unlike those, it's not silence. It's the sound of death walking into the room, her dark robe reaching the floor tiles, and sitting next to her, checking her pocket watch and then whispering into her ear. "Almost done."

And then Lara stands up and screams at her. "No, please, don't!" Tears stream down her face as she begs her to spare him, falling to her knees and screaming, running her hands across her face. "Take me instead," she pleas, but death just stares at her and ignores her prayers.

A warm hand on her shoulder brings her back from sleep. Lara bolts upright and searches the room for any change, until her eyes meet Christine's. "I thought your shift ended an hour ago," she mumbles, her voice deepened by sleep.

Christine shakes her face with a soft smile. "I had some paperwork to complete before I could go home. Do you need a lift?" Before her friend's obvious indecision, she continues. "If anything happens, they'll call you."

Lara doesn't actually want to go home, she's fine, she doesn't need anything. But Christine's offer is just so kind and her concern can be read in her eyes, so she lets out a deep breath and slowly stands up. "Thank you," she mumbles as she crosses her arms on her chest.

The other one smiles gently as she opens the white door. "Always."

She takes a deep breath, but air is burning in her lungs. Her eyes wander across the page before her, formulas mixing with each other and words jumping from a line to the other. She shuts the book closed and stares at its cover, even though her mind is lost somewhere else. The couch dips on one side as Stephen sits down next to her. "How are you feeling?" He asks calmly. 

She doesn't answer and instead leans with her head on his shoulder. She closes her eyes and laughs sarcastically. "What's the correct answer?"

He moves a strand of hair from her face with a shaking hand. "We've already talked about this," he says, attempting a hint of a smile.

She opens her eyes and looks up to his face, a light smirk on her lips. "Well, I'm quite sure we both need to revise it then." She carelessly makes her book float on the closest shelf, in the little scientific section of the Sanctum library, probably one of the best things she had found in that place. Not the best one though.

She sighs, her eyes set on the floor. "I'm fine, really. You don't have to worry about me." She breathes out a laugh and moves her gaze to the sorcerer. "I know you're concerned about me, but there's no reason to. I… I just need to distract myself." She stops and thinks it through for a moment. "Right?"

He nods, not convinced at all. He knows her too well to fall for it. "Uhm, listen," he starts, uncertain. If she didn't know better, Lara would be shocked by his almost shy behaviour. "Wong is at Kamar-Taj and we both need to get out of this place, so..."

She giggles. "You can say we both suck at cooking and you'd rather not get botulism, I won't get offended." She smiles at Stephen stammering, something surprising for a cold and detached Master of the Mystic Arts but not for the man she’s been living with for years, and gets up. Stephen furrows his brows and stares at her confused. With a smirk, she leans forward. "So, are we going?"

Lara is still giggling when she hands the cashier her credit card and Stephen is seriously tempted to portal himself back to the Sanctum for a second just to get the Time Stone and stop time in that exact moment, occasionally reliving that couple of hours in between him inviting her out for lunch and her going back to the hospital. 

As they leave the restaurant, he reaches for his sling ring, hidden in his pocket, but Lara promptly stops him. "Oh it's not necessary, I can take the subway." He looks a little saddened and she smirks, arching a brow. "But you can accompany me, if you don't feel calm with me using the dangerous undergrounds of New York with nothing to protect myself but cosmic powers and a knife."

He rolls his eyes and breathes out a laugh. "Did I really go from being a Master of the Mystic Arts to your bodyguard?"

She smirks and points a finger to his chest. "Don't know about you, but I call that a promotion."

He smiles.  _ "Frankly, I do too." _

The subway is extremely crowded, even for a city like New York on a working Thursday, yet Stephen and Lara manage to find a spot where they can have a little more space. Not that any of them would mind being close to the other, of course. But despite all their efforts, huge groups of people keep getting on. Lara is in the middle of making a sarcastic comment about Stephen almost falling because of the subway's abrupt braking, when a guy pushes her against Stephen. In the exact moment when her hands lend on his chest, her cheeks turn bright red and she looks to the side to hide her embarrassment and, hopefully, throw that damn stranger a look frightening enough for him to move away. But the guy is completely uninterested, too busy reading something on his phone.

She gasps when she finds Stephen even closer to her, a group of teenagers reclaiming their space right behind the sorcerer. The scene that follows is rather awkward, both of them stammering apologies, until at some indefinite point they stop for no reason at all. Lara looks at Stephen and her face heats up.  _ "F*ck, this is not good." _ She knows she shouldn't feel like this. It's just stupid and completely counterproductive and she has already allowed herself to be way too sentimentally attached to people, especially Stephen.  _ "This is not gonna end well," _ she tells herself, trying to smile nonchalantly as she moves hair out of her face.  _ "You know pretty well how it ended last time, Lara," _ her inner self points out. So what should she do? Stay there and wait or do something or try and make a joke or-

_ "Sh*t, he looks good..." _ She immediately redirects her gaze from his lips to the window.  _ "It's surprising how you are a highly trained assassin yet have the survival instinct of a panda." _ She tries to smile. "Well, at least you're now less likely to almost fall again," she jokes, but immediately realizes by his embarrassed laugh that it was not a good idea.  _ "You must be f*cking kidding me. Does that sound like something you should ever tell someone?" _ Her gaze falls down on his arms, one of them lingering around her waist to keep her from hitting the window, his sleeves slightly rolled up and-  _ "What are you, twelve? You're a lethal killer, you really ought not to be crushing on the first sorcerer they push against you." _ Okay, maybe now she should-

The voice of the speaker announcing the subway stop brings her back from her thoughts. She attempts a smile. "I- I have to go. Thank you… for accompanying me." And a minute later she's rushing down the street, her mind trying desperately to understand what has just happened, when she suddenly stops right before crossing the street. All her muscles freeze and her eyes widen.  _ "F*ck." _ In that exact moment Lara realizes what Elize meant when she said she had the emotional intelligence of a piece of furniture. No matter how much she has tried to escape her emotions, they have found her and now she's their slave again. And it's almost stupid how she has never noticed it before because since that very day in Frank's basement she's done nothing but becoming more and more attached to people. And one of them is Stephen. 

But maybe she's just overthinking everything, she doesn't really feel that way towards Stephen, right? Right?!?  _ "No, you do." _ No, she does, which is terrible. She not only doesn't have time for a relationship or a crush or whatever this thing is supposed to be, but is also the last person who should probably get with someone. She has absolutely no idea what she is supposed to do or what she is feeling or what  _ Stephen _ is feeling, considering the only romantic experience she has had wasn't exactly the best. And what if he ends up being just like with  _ him _ ? Even he was all kind and sweet before dragging her into hell. But Stephen isn't like him, she knows it, she wants to believe it. But Christine must have broken up with him for a reason. But he has changed and is now good friends with her. But she shouldn't do anything anyway. Maybe she is just overthinking everything, maybe he just sees her as a friend. Or maybe he wouldn't be able to deal with her messed up concept of romance, which she would totally understand. She shouldn't force him to be her therapist just because she finds him hot, but mostly funny and kind and smart and caring and-

And she crashes her face against the glass door of the hospital entrance, earning a confused look from the receptionist inside the building. She sighs and walks in, but while entering the hospital ward she is almost pushed on the ground by two nurses running down the hallway. The closer she gets to her brother's room, the more people she finds. And right there, standing by the door, is Lilith.

The woman smiles at Lara, which is on its own something extremely uncommon. Lara crosses her arms on her chest, fisting her jacket, and takes a step to the side to let a doctor walk past her. "What's going on, Cohen?" She asks, arching a brow.

Lilith smiles even wider and takes her hands out of the pockets of her blue jeans. "You will not believe it!" She looks excited in an almost childish way, two words - excited and childish - which could have never been used before to describe her. "Jonathan is waking up."

Lara freezes, her eyes wide open and her jaw on the floor. "He is  _ what _ ?"

No more than a second later, Doctor Seward is standing right before Lara. "Oh you're already here, miss Johnson." The man's appearance is perfectly neat, almost as if someone waking up from a coma would judge his attire. He adjusts the cuffs of his medical gown and studies both Lilith's smile and Lara's furrowed brows. "May I talk with you for a moment?" He asks, finally turning to Lara and gesturing to his office down the hall.

Lara takes a sip of her cheap coffee, probably her least favourite thing about hospitals. On an equal footing with the plastic chairs of the waiting room, of course. A quick look to her phone lets her know it's been three hours since she first entered the hospital. Lilith is sitting still a couple feet from her, looking down at the white floor tiles. Another nurse exits Jonathan's room, but this time he doesn't walk past them, most likely directed towards some other room or wherever nurses spend their time. Instead he stops before Lara. "I'm sorry?" He asks politely, slightly tilting his head to the side to meet her gaze. "You can come and see mister Houghton. Just please do not talk loudly or give him news that might upset him."

As he accompanies her to Jonathan's room, he briefly instructs her on how to behave. Then they stop before his door. She looks back to him, a bit anxious, and he smiles at her before leaving. She swallows heavily and knocks on the door. The voice coming from the other side makes her heart flutter. She slowly opens the door and walks in. Jonathan is staring at her, a few machines still attached to him, and she smiles. A few large steps and she's sitting by his side on the bed. She moves a hair lock from his forehead. "Hey, how are you feeling?" She asks, her voice trembling.

He turns a corner of his lips upward. "I've been gone for a while, am I wrong?" She furrows her brows and he laughs. "Just answer me, I'm not gonna die."

She nods and, to Jonathan's great surprise, she hugs him. Her arms lock around his shoulders and she hides her face in the crook of his neck. "I'm sorry, I should have been there for you," she whispers.

He hugs her back and places a quick kiss to the side of her head. "You were, Elle."

She shakes her head, biting her bottom lip not to cry. "Sandra- She… I thought you were dead, Jon. I thought you were gone forever and I was not there. I left you alone with her."

He parts from her and holds her face in his hands, forcing himself to smile. "Hey, look at me. I am fine, you are fine, everyone is fine. You saved me, you kept me alive. Thank you." He wipes away a lonely tear trailing down her cheek and turns his lips upwards. "Now do you mind telling me how long I've been sleeping so I know how many football matches I've missed?"

Jonathan leaves the hospital four days later and moves to Lara's old flat in Queens with Elize. Before getting on Lara's car to go home, he meets Lilith, who wants to talk with him, but he ignores her and, considering how poorly she has always treated him, Lara can't even blame him.

In the meantime, Agency X is busy reorganizing itself after Sandra's death. Mitch Anderson immediately gains control over the East Coast, abandoning all the other bases on the Pacific coast and in the continental area. The central states unexpectedly accept the lead of the Head of Department living in Oklahoma City. It has always been common knowledge among agents that this particular man was well fit to run Agency X, or at least a part of it, but he had never had a good relationship with Mark Feige. He was considered too violent, even crazy, and he was known for abusing his romantic partners, yet his manipulative manners had always kept him safe and he had secured a following of loyal friends who would have gone to hell and back with or for him, no matter how many S.H.I.E.L.D. bases he set on fire for personal reasons. Sandra Houghton appreciated his lack of scruples and made him Head of Department in the state he came from, Oklahoma, but it was not enough for him. Now that Sandra is out of the way and Mitch is busy playing with his zombies and experiments, he knows how to assure himself the total lead of Agency X. S.H.I.E.L.D. may be big and dangerous, but so he is and he's going to prove it, as sure as his name is Alex Main.


End file.
